Month: May 2016

This week I wanted to have a simple slave machine that I could use for our CI/CD integration of our ARM templates. Here I was thinking of leveraging an A0 machine (10-11€/month) with Windows Nano on it, as this doesn’t need the biggest footprint. So out I went to deploy!

Deploying

When you want to deploy a nano system, just look it up like you would with (for example) a windows 2012 / 2016 machine… Type “nano” in the search bar.

I’m not going to elaborate on the deployment, as this is pretty straightforward and like any system deployment.

So what was my logic here? I went to the project website and took the latest release (bundled as a zip file). Sounds great? It failed… Everytime I got the following error ;

Error extracting the activities from module xActiveDirectory-2.10.0.0-PSGallery. Extraction failed with the following error: Orchestrator.Shared.AsyncModuleImport.ModuleImportException: Cannot import the module of name xActiveDirectory-2.10.0.0-PSGallery, as the module structure was invalid.

After a hint by Joe Levy, it struck me… The command was expecting a nuget package! Underneath, this is also a zipfile. So when obtaining that package and using it for the -ContentLink, all went smooth!

Today I was setting up a Traffic Manager deployment in Resource Manager. I wanted a rather “simple” failover scenario where my secondary site would only take over when my primary site was down. As you might now, there are several routing methods, where “failover” is one ;

Failover: Select Failover when you have endpoints in the same or different Azure datacenters (known as regions in the Azure classic portal) and want to use a primary endpoint for all traffic, but provide backups in case the primary or the backup endpoints are unavailable.

Though I was surprised that the naming between the “classic mode” (“the old portal“) and “resource manager” (“the new portal“) were different!

Performance : You’ll be redirected to the closest endpoint (based on network response in ms)

Round Robin : The load will be distributed between all nodes. Depending on the weight of a node, one might get more or less requests.

Failover : A picking order will be in place. The highest ranking system alive will receive the requests.

“New Portal” / Resource Manager

When taking a look at “Resource Manager”, we’ll see (again) three methods ;

Though the naming differs… When going into the technical details, it’s more a naming thing than a technical thing. The functionalitity is (give of take) the same. Where the “Round Robin” had the option of weights (1-1000) before, this now seems a focal point. Where “Failover” was working with a list (visualizuation), you can now directly alter the “priority” (1-1000) of each endpoint.

The info when checking out the routing method from within the portal ;

Performance: Use this method when your endpoints are deployed in different geographic locations, and you want to use the one with the lowest latency.

Priority: Use this method when you want to select an endpoint which has highest priority and is available.

Weighted: Use this method when you want to distribute traffic across a set of endpoints as per the weights provided.

TL;DR

Where the naming differs between the two stacks, the functionality remains the same ;

After searching a bit, I encountered various posts regarding powershell deployment. Though, as I was using ARM templates (JSON), it was apparent that there is a difference in deploying regular OS images (like Windows, Ubuntu, …) and marketplace items like (Kemp, Netscaler, Barracuda, CheckPoint, …). The latter will require an additional parameter ; “plan”.

In a regular deployment we would only need line 32. When working with marketplace items we’ll need to add the code for line 5. What’s the content of those two parameters? Let’s check the parameters section…

The documentation on this is quite scarce… Though the name for the plan isn’t something you can choose yourself. This is the SKU of the marketplace item! I hope this helped, as it got me distracted from my endgoal for a bit. 🙂

Up in the Clouds

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